ABSTRACT
In the literature, all possible relationships between cognition and affect have been proposed. Affect may serve both as a source of information about the target person and as a facilitator in storing and retrieving prior cognitions. Once affect-assisted material is retrieved and available, the next stage addresses the question of how this material is integrated with contemporaneous cognitions and informative emotions into a social judgment. Kaplan and Anderson rejected a reinforcement-conditioning model as too narrow for social judgment, and instead proposed a cognitive integration interpretation for these early studies, which treats emotional stimuli the same as cognitive stimuli, reducing both to their scale values for the judgment. A similar cognitive interpretation is implied in Schwarz and Clore’s treatment, though they are unclear with respect to the process of integration.
